RESEARCH ARTICLE Hitting a Moving Target: A Model for Malaria Elimination in the Presence of Population Movement Sheetal Prakash Silal1*, Francesca Little1, Karen Irma Barnes2, Lisa Jane White3,4 1 Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7700, South Africa, 2 Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town, Observatory, 7925, South Africa, 3 Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, 4 Centre for Tropical Medicine, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Churchill Hospital, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom *
[email protected] Abstract South Africa is committed to eliminating malaria with a goal of zero local transmission by OPEN ACCESS 2018. Malaria elimination strategies may be unsuccessful if they focus only on vector biol- Citation: Silal SP, Little F, Barnes KI, White LJ (2015) ogy, and ignore the mobility patterns of humans, particularly where the majority of infections Hitting a Moving Target: A Model for Malaria are imported. In the first study in Mpumalanga Province in South Africa designed for this Elimination in the Presence of Population Movement. PLoS ONE 10(12): e0144990. doi:10.1371/journal. purpose, a metapopulation model is developed to assess the impact of their proposed elimi- pone.0144990 nation-focused policy interventions. A stochastic, non-linear, ordinary-differential equation Editor: Nakul Chitnis, Swiss Tropical and Public model is fitted to malaria data from Mpumalanga and neighbouring Maputo Province in Health Institute, SWITZERLAND Mozambique. Further scaling-up of vector control is predicted to lead to a minimal reduction Received: November 25, 2014 in local infections, while mass drug administration and focal screening and treatment at the Mpumalanga-Maputo border are predicted to have only a short-lived impact.